Report – Is Facebook organic reach risen from death?

Facebook organic reach is dead, they said.

When we started to work on this report, spring timidly began to look into our area. Our private Facebook newsfeeds immediately became full of text statuses, pictures and videos, showing and praising the beauty of European spring.

Gradual and gentle awakening of the nature, visible inside and outside, arisen among us one, extremely important question. If everything what we know about organic reach of Facebook posts is exactly the same like various social media ‘evangelists’ are trying to convince us? Our study unquestionably proves that they are wrong! In a certain aspects of organic reach. Surprised? We were too! Let’s deal with myths that has grown around the issue. Have a look at the facts as they really are.

Myth no. 1 : Organic reach is going down and down so the only alternative is paid traffic.

Busted! However the growth of organic traffic is not tremendously huge, we can observe the gradual surge. Especially in a second half of 2016. Q1 and Q2 in this case noted slight decrease, but since the end of Q3, the upward trend is continual. Both type of traffic, organic and paid, can peacefully coexist. In the pursuit of creativity and strategic thinking, marketers can continue their efforts to combine both, without worries about their budgets for 2017.

Complete nonsense. Moreover, according to our research, organic reach of text statuses is experiencing a real renaissance. This visible increase at the end of Q4 2016 can be directly linked to the fact of implementation the new Facebook algorithm. It seems successfully sifting spammy stuff and boosting content of better quality. Increase from 16.3% to 23.8% throughout the year, is something really impressive. That is letting us strongly disclaim the theory about the decline of textual status

Myth no. 3 : Page with high number of followers have always larger reach rate.

High number of users liking your page does not equal the higher reach rate. This is exactly the case of huge fanpages which steadily loss their organic reach with development of follower base. That applies particularly to the three types of content. These, from which we would paradoxically expect more organic reach than plain textual statuses – are pictures, links and videos. Among named, links seems to perform the worst. Hence, their reach rate for Facebook pages with more than 1 m followers was only 13.8%

Myth no. 4 : Camera is the new keyboard and video is ruling the content

It is true and false at the same time. Sounds tricky? Well, it’s not easy issue as it looks like. The undisputable is fact, how impactful on social media was the rise of Snapchat and how continuous battle between them transformed Facebook. Almost overnight, users have discovered how easy is to turn on the camera and shooting a short clip. Thus, not only the easiness to be shoot, but also how ‘digestible’ and reactful is this type of content for others. Media companies and creative agencies have not ignored this wave. Facebook, like a lightning, has become a second-most popular video platform after YouTube.

Therefore, it is not difficult to guess that video content, initially hitting the extremely high reach rates, could have become a ‘victim’ of Facebook algorithm. The specified algorithm, is filtering and leaving in user’s timeline only outstanding videos. As a result, the reach rate of videos over all, is constantly getting down. This tendency seems to be inversely proportional to increase of text statuses.

What awaits us in 2017?

Yet is a right moment to draw some conclusions, is still a little bit too early to clarify the 100% sure trends for 2017 . Nevertheless, we hope that points below might help you to create better content for your Facebook profiles :

Organic traffic is definitely not dead and doing good. Improvement of content quality has begun to deliver aimed results.

If the content is the king, text statuses seems to be emperor. Reading, letters and alphabet never went old-fashioned and the key is how do you prepare your content.

Getting big goes hand in hand with moving away from your followers. For consideration to anyone who decides to purchase followers not interested in your content and never become a committed fans.

If deciding to use video content, keep in mind securing the highest quality of the materials you are producing.